If they had migrated south, those on the continental European land mass would have been unable to return as the land bridge which had joined it disappeared after the Anglian ice age. Island Britain did not open up again until 60,000 years ago, when sea levels dropped to expose a huge land mass archaeologists named Doggerland, allowing Neanderthals and H. sapiens to cross into Norfolk. Doggerland is now beneath the North Sea.

Stars of the show

The room showing what happened when humans reappeared contains the real stars of the show. A few metres apart stand a small and stocky, friendly faced Neanderthal man and a taller, leaner, meaner-looking early modern human.

At first glance, the larger modern man looks as if he has a cigarette hanging from his lips (see image, above right). In fact, it is a fine paintbrush which he is using to paint his upper leg. His ankles are also covered in a red ochre pigment. He lived 33,000 years ago in Paviland in Wales. Well, that's where the body he is modelled on was found – his head was from the Czech Republic.

The moody modern man, the Neanderthal, and the gallery of ancestral heads at the start of the exhibition were made by Dutch palaeo-artists and identical twin brothers, Alfons and Adrie Kennis.

Aside from those stunning realisations, there are other treasures: a human skull shaped into a bowl from Gough's cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, and artwork carved into antlers. There are also early sewing needles – a "huge advance" says Stringer, which would have afforded a significant survival edge.

The journey through time peters out somewhat in modern Britain, with NHM illustrating Britain as the human melting pot it has always been. A video shows celebrities, some of whose genetic make-up reveals them to be 1 to 2 per cent Neanderthal.

Nevertheless, the exhibition succeeds magnificently in pulling together all the strands of Britain's early human history, and in creating a real sense of how our ancestors lived. And despite the thousands of years that separate us, those reconstructed faces hold captivating pre-echoes of the humans we have become.

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This reconstruction of an early modern human depicts him with a painting tool in his lips (Image: The Natural History Museum, London)